I bet you’ve noticed that people with autism don’t display their feelings too easily. I used to cry at the front door when Jonny went off to school and didn’t even turn back to say goodbye to me as he walked out the door to school. In fact I didn’t even think he had feelings for the first 5 years of his life.

At six, he rode his bike across a busy highway without stopping to see if any cars were coming. I got very mad at him yelling “Jonathan, what do you think you are doing? You could have been killed.”  He said “sorry, mom”. I snapped back in my anger saying “sorry doesn’t cut it”.

He began crying which shocked me.  He said “you hurt my feelings.”  Up until that time, he didn’t display his feelings in the traditional sense, so I didn’t know how to perceive his feelings.  Sometimes it appeared he didn’t even have feelings though I knew he did.

After one of my readers read this recently, she wrote this back to me:

Thank you and this is so true my girl is now 12 and shows her feelings but not towards her baby sister who is now 2yrs, she don’t really even like to be around her and when she does which is not much at all it surprises me that Skye daughter with Autism will even play with her ball i’m sure these are signs of progress.